Harry Potter's Quest in The Chamber of Secrets

Harry Potter began his education at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and
Wizardry in the first of seven projected novels: Harry Potter
and the Philosopher’s Stone. In that first novel, Harry was
on a quest to find the Philosopher’s Stone, which turns base metal into
gold and produces an elixir of immortality. But his real quest in that
novel, as in the succeeding books of the series, is for self-knowledge.
In the second book of the series, Harry Potter and the
Chamber of Secrets, Harry continues his education and his
quest for self-knowledge during his second year at Hogwarts.

In his second year, Harry learns, among other things, about
the three marks of existence that the Buddha taught, namely (1) that
life involves suffering, (2) that we have no enduring separate self,
and (3) that everything is constantly changing or transforming. Indeed,
transformation is the key theme of Harry Potter and the
Chamber of Secrets.

Harry has returned
to Hogwarts School after the summer vacation only to discover that
something is very much amiss. Daubed on a wall of the school are the
words “the chamber of secrets has been opened. enemies of the heir,
beware.” The “heir” is a descendant of Salazar Slytherin, one of the
four founding Wizards of Hogwarts, the only one who believed that none
but pure-blooded Wizards should be admitted as students. To ensure the
eventual implementation of his belief, he created a secret chamber deep
underground, a chamber that only his true heir, a descendant who shared
his belief, could open. And in that secret chamber was concealed a
secret monster—a Basilisk, which is a serpent whose look either kills
or petrifies.

Harry’s quest in the second book is
to identify Salazar Slytherin’s heir, to find the Chamber of Secrets,
and to kill the killer Basilisk. All three of these—the heir, the
Chamber, and the Basilisk—have symbolic meaning. Slytherin’s heir is
Carl Jung’s Shadow archetype or Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Dweller on the
Threshold. He is that aspect of ourselves, of our own past, that we
must overcome when we enter the Path. The deep underground Chamber of
Secrets is that part of our psyche housing our repressed urges, the
skandhas that drag us down and backward. And the Basilisk, which kills
and petrifies, is a negative energy opposing the upward thrust of life
and evolution, or it is the separate and separative mind, the great
slayer of the Real (as The Voice of the Silence
calls it).

Everything represented by those
three—the heir, the chamber, and the Basilisk—must be transformed if we
are to continue on the Path of Self-discovery, the Path of Evolution.
To transform those three and progress, Harry Potter learns about the
Buddha’s three marks of existence.

The first of
those marks is that life involves pain or frustration. Harry
experiences frustration throughout the novel, beginning with his misery
during his summer vacation at the house of his Muggle relatives, where
he was mistreated and isolated in every way—not even receiving letters
from his school friends, because the house-elf Dobby was intercepting
his mail (for what he thought was Harry’s own good). From that point
onward, the novel is a catalog of Harry’s other frustrations and pains.
Dobby’s further efforts to protect Harry get him in trouble with his
relatives, with the Wizard government, with the school authorities, and
finally cause him to be battered by a rogue Bludger during a Quidditch
game and to have the bones of his arm shattered. Harry has to suffer
the unwelcome attention and unwanted patronage of Gilderoy Lockhart, a
pseudo wizard. He is battered by the Whomping Willow tree when the car
he and Ron are driving rams into it. He misses the delights of a
Halloween party at Hogwarts and has to endure instead the tedium of a
Deathday party for the ghost of Nearly Headless Nick. He is the victim
of foul play and dirty tricks at a dueling club meeting. He has to
endure the suspicion and dislike of most of his fellow students at
Hogwarts, who believe he is the Heir of Slytherin. He is captured by
Aragog, a giant spider, who wants to feed Harry to his brood of spider
children. He has to battle the Basilisk without looking at it, because
its look is death. And he has to overcome Tom Riddle, the deadly spirit
of Voldemort as a boy. Those are only some of the frustrations and
pains that Harry learns are inevitable in life because they are
essential elements in the plot of life.

The second
of the Buddha’s marks of existence is the fact that there is no stable
“I” inside us. Harry learns about this mark particularly in his
dealings with Tom Marvolo Riddle, who is the Heir of Slytherin and who
was a student at Hogwarts fifty years earlier but grew up to be Lord
Voldemort, the embodiment of evil forces. Harry has something of
Voldemort or Tom Riddle in him. That theme continues in future novels,
for in the fourth book of the series, something of Harry is absorbed by
Voldemort, allowing the evil Wizard to achieve embodiment again. And
when Harry first came to Hogwarts, the Sorting Hat (which assigns new
students to their houses) wanted to put Harry into Slytherin
House—which was the house of Tom Riddle or Voldemort. Harry does not
know who or what he is. At the center of his being, where the sense of
“I” should reside, there is a question mark. Harry is on a quest for
self-discovery, and what he must discover is that there is no separate
self to discover. There is only One Self in all of us, whether we are
Harry Potter or the riddling Voldemort.

The third
of the Buddha’s marks of existence is that everything is ever
changing--the theme of this novel, which is that all things transform.
The novel has many examples of transformation, from the trivial to the
momentous.

1. At the beginning of Harry’s second
year at school, he and his friend Ron miss the train to Hogwarts, and
so travel there instead in a Muggle car, a Ford Anglia, that has been
enchanted by Ron’s father so that it can fly. The car has been
transformed by magic. Thus Harry’s new school year begins with the aid
of a transformation.

2. Dobby is a house-elf in
the service of the cruel and wicked Lucius Malfoy. House-elves are
perpetually indentured servants, whose only reason for existing is to
serve their masters. They wear pillowcases for clothing and can be
freed only if the master gives them an article of proper clothing.
Dobby is devoted to Harry because the infant Harry’s defeat of the
wicked Wizard Voldemort made life better for all innocent creatures in
the world. Dobby therefore wants to protect Harry from harm and nearly
kills him in the process, but finally Harry manages to free Dobby by
tricking the house-elf’s master into tossing away an old sock, which
Dobby catches, thereby being transformed from a slave into a free elf.

3. Before the identity of the Heir of Slytherin becomes known,
Harry and his friends Ron and Hermione form a plan to test their theory
that the heir is Draco Malfoy, the son of Lucius (Dobby’s cruel
master). The plan, devised by the clever Hermione, is to concoct a
Polyjuice Potion, which will transform whoever drinks it into the
appearance of a different person. Harry and Ron are to transform into
two of Draco’s henchmen, Crabbe and Goyle, and thereby discover whether
Draco is Slytherin’s heir. They do so transform and discover that Draco
is not the Heir of Slytherin. Poor Hermione, however, makes a mistake
and transforms into a mixed shape of a human girl and a cat and has to
be untransformed in the school’s infirmary.

4. The
letters of the name “Tom Marvolo Riddle,” the true Heir of Slytherin
are reordered into an anagram: “I am Lord Voldemort.” Thus the two
names are transformations of each other. And more significantly, the
school boy Tom Riddle transforms into the archevil Wizard Voldemort.

5. The Basilisk, which is hidden in the Chamber of Secrets,
is a symbol of negative transformation because it kills or petrifies
its victim; that is, the evil serpent transforms its victim into a
lifeless state. The Basilisk is thus an appropriate agent of Voldemort,
whose French name (vol de mort) means “flight of
death.” The Basilisk, however, is contrasted with another fabulous
creature of opposite symbolism—the Phoenix.

6.
Harry in his battle against the Basilisk is assisted by a Phoenix,
which is a symbol of positive transformation. The Phoenix is a bird
that lives a very long time, but when the end of its life approaches,
the Phoenix does not die. Instead, the bird bursts into flames, which
consume its body. From the ashes arises a new baby Phoenix—the old bird
reborn. The Phoenix is thus a symbol of death and resurrection, of
regeneration, or of transformation into a new life.

7. The climactic transformation in the book, however, is one that
actually occurred long before its story began, indeed even before the
first book, but which we learn about only near the end of the second
novel. When Harry is in the Chamber of Secrets, the specter of Tom
Riddle speaks with him and comments: “there are strange likenesses
between us, Harry Potter. . . . Both half-bloods, orphans, raised by
Muggles. Probably the only two Parselmouths [Wizards who can talk with
serpents] to come to Hogwarts since the great Slytherin himself. We
even look something alike.” The similarities between Tom Riddle and
Harry Potter are due to an early exchange between Voldemort (Tom Riddle
grown up) and the infant Harry. When Voldemort tried to kill Harry as a
baby, he failed because of the shield of love with which Harry’s mother
had surrounded her son. Instead, Voldemort’s magic curse was reflected
back on him, destroying his body and limiting his powers. In the
process, some of Voldemort’s powers passed over into Harry’s infant
body. Those powers, in being transferred from Voldemort to Harry,
caused Harry to become in some sense a transformation of Voldemort,
good transformed out of evil.

“Tom Riddle” is
appropriate as Voldemort’s real name. For he, as well as his name, is a
riddle—like evil itself. Some evil appears to be consciously and
deliberately so, but how that can be is a riddle—the riddle of evil.
This riddle has obsessed human beings from ancient times. It is the
subject of the biblical Book of Job, of John Milton’s epic Paradise
Lost, of C. S. Lewis’s book The Problem of Pain.
The riddle, briefly, is how evil can exist in a world created by a good
God or according to a divine Plan. The riddle of evil seems to be a
major theme of the whole Harry Potter series. In addition, the name
“Tom” is short for “Thomas,” and the name “Thomas” means “a twin.” Tom
Riddle or Voldemort and Harry Potter are twins, as Tom’s comment about
their likeness suggests. They are twins as transformations of each
other, the one evil and the other good. In that, they are parallel to
the Basilisk and the Phoenix, another pair of twins, also representing
the transformations of death and life, involution and evolution.

All the transformations in the novel are, however, only little
examples of the greatest transformation of all. The greatest
transformation is that of the One Self, which transforms itself into
the multitudinous creation—into Harry, Voldemort, you, me, and
everything. But it does not stop there. For the multitudinous
creation—Harry, Voldemort, you, me, and everything—is in the process of
transforming itself back into the One Self. And that is the ultimate
Secret in the Chamber of our hearts.